reliability

Some time ago I had to port scan a network which happend to be mostly filtered out and in general rather scarcely populated. When I have started the port scan I had realized that my uplink connection regularly suffers from packet loss as high as 20% and there was no way to fix it in a foreseeable future. The next insight was this: there is no way for a port scanner to produce reliable results under these (and even more favourable) circumstances. So I have tried to quantify the reliability of the results of the port scan exercises carried out over the Internet.